Six Questions interview #198 : Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the bestselling author of Wait Softly Brother (2023 Giller Longlist), All the Broken Things (Toronto Book Award shortlist, CBC Canada Reads longlist), Perfecting, The Nettle Spinner (Amazon First Novel Award shortlist, ReLit Prize shortlist), Way Up (Danuta Gleed Award). Her short fiction has been published in Granta Magazine (UK), The Walrus Magazine (CDN), The Lifted Brow (AUS), Significant Objects (USA), 7X7 LA (USA), Maclean’s magazine (CDN), and many others. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I was born in Ottawa and lived there until I was five, when my parents bought a farm property near Metcalfe, Ontario, and built the home I consider to be my childhood home. I lived there until I went to the University of Ottawa, when I moved back into the city. I left the region entirely to live in Belgium and then, later, Toronto. I married and had children and we moved for work purposes. I am now divorced and living in Prince Edward County, Ontario. I guess I am a country mouse but I like cities well enough to visit.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I wrote my first stories as soon as I could write at age five and began to seriously think of writing as a job during my undergraduate degree at U of O, mentored in courses with the Galiano-island writer Audrey Thomas and the Saskatchewan novelist, Guy Vanderhaege, both of whom did writer-in-residence programs in the 80s there. It was Thomas who suggested I start submitting my work to journals, in part, I think, because she knew how failure would be the best editorial. I have endured a lot of rejection in my writing life and, for some reason, it entrenches my belief that I am a writer. Obviously, I have developed a complex about this, the knot of which is unlikely to ever be unwound.

I never really had much of a writing community in Ottawa though I did write for a time with the playwright, Michael O’Brien and also with the sound artist, Christof Migone, whom I’ve since collaborated with (along with the poet and children’s author, Jordan Scott) on a project call Today Calls, which I am happy to see is still running online.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?

I’ve written collaboratively with the critical theorist, Mari Ruti, who tragically died in June of this year (2023). That book—about writing and living creatively—is on submission. But it’s rare to find someone with whom you can write together or, at least, it has been for me.

I go in and out of contact with writers and artists. I often find I work best alone troubling words until they make some sort of sense but, at other times, I find I need people around me. I used to work exclusively alone at home, swearing I could never work in a café, and then discovered, for a time, that I could only work in cafés. I was part of an online group of writers for a year or so but that hasn’t worked well for me lately. I have gone to residencies (Yaddo and the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts) where artists and writers are banned from speaking all day but come together in the evenings and talk shop and life. I have enjoyed that and found it productive. I’ve also written directly online and written some good work. I like an audience and the risk involved in that sort of exposure but, not always. I guess I find a style or approach hard to pin down. I change and my practice changes, too. It’s never one thing. I don’t think it has much to do with where I live, although, here in this little village in which I now live, there really are no local cafés and so I made a little room for myself with a comfortable chair and a place to put my tea mug. That is good enough for now.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

I have been so long away from Ottawa that I don’t really know about the scene. That said, I recently did a reading with Hollay Ghadery at Perfect Books and found there a beautiful, robust, and lovingly curated shop of great literature so there must be a scene.  

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

My first stories are almost all set in and near Ottawa. There stories are from collected images and made-up things that I collaged into stories—they are autobiographical in a funky sort of way. All my work has been autobiographical to some extent but especially Wait Softly Brother, my most recent book, which is explicitly so, about my stillborn brother and the psychological result of repressing a tragedy that is so un-mournable.

Q: What are you working on now?

So many projects. A memoir in essays about coming out and becoming. A queer coming-of-age novel set in my new environment in the early 80s. And poems, believe it or not.

 

Six Questions interview #197 : Jennifer Hulshof

Jennifer Hulshof: I was born and raised in Ottawa, and never left having my whole family here. I come from a once large Irish Catholic family, my grandparents having five kids and growing up with all of my cousins like they were brothers and sisters are some of my fondest memories. BBQs and Sunday dinners at their place. Football in the living room with the men all shouting at the tiny box television. The smell of turkey throughout the house at Christmas with a loaded tree.

I graduated from high school in 1996 and had my first daughter shortly after, with my second daughter arriving not quite two years later. I attended Algonquin College and took media communications thinking I would become a freelance journalist, but quickly realized I preferred writing fiction more than reality. I’ve been writing stories since I was six years old and able to put pen to paper. Papers I’ve left scattered wherever I went much to my mother’s chagrin. 

I have always had a fascination with the paranormal, especially vampires (also to my mother’s chagrin), drawing my inspirations from authors like Anne Rice and L.J Smith, as well as, in recent years, J.R. Ward and Laurell K. Hamilton.

I wrote my first book The Council in 2014, and my second, Cloak and Dagger, in the trilogy a year. It took me two more years to write my third The Coven, with many ups and downs occurring in the publishing world. In 2019, my first book was featured at BookExpo and BookCon in New York City, and I’m currently working on number four in the series which will be titled, Heart of Darkness.

I like dogs and cats and horses, reading and of course writing. I have finally found the love of my life whose support has been outstanding through my whole process of writing and publishing and getting noticed. My hope is one day for my books to be adapted to film, and possibly made into graphic novels as well.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

A: I was born and raised in Ottawa and never moved away as my family is all here.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

A: I've been writing ever since I have been able to put pen to paper, and didn't really get involved in the writing community here in Ottawa so much as in the States when I got picked up by a very small publishing company called Authorhouse who helped me publish my first book.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

A: It's been a Rollercoaster ride of ups and downs in the writing community, a lot of struggles and being scammed once too many times has changed how I feel towards my writing. I've experienced a lot of writers block as a result trying to get my fourth book written. But at the same time my passion for it is still there and I've even toyed with the idea of an offshoot series from my second book which I love and wrote very easily. 

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

A: I’ve had the opportunity here to display some copies of my books in independent bookstores in and around the area, I had a book signing that definitely boosted sales. There is definitely a lot of opportunity to market here, however I find not a lot of publishing companies willing to take me on.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

A: I was given the opportunity to be featured (for a fee) at BookExpo and BookCon in New York City via a small publishing company called URLinkandmedia, which was an incredible experience and slightly boosted sales. Definitely gave me a different perspective of the writing industry and the struggles and challenges as an author to gain notoriety. It's also challenged me to look at the trending demands of my target audience and rethink a lot of my delivery when telling the story I want to convey.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm currently working on book four of my series The Council. Book four is called Heart of Darkness. 

I’ve always found there weren’t a lot of strong female main characters portrayed as vampires in any series I read or watched and wanted to create one of my own: Ashton Gament is a vampire born as a human slave in ancient Egypt, saved from a death sentence by a vampire who gave her the gift of eternal life….but there are rules to follow being a vampire, and they are strictly governed by the ancient original vampires known as the Council. Ashton faces off against them in the biggest battle of her very long life.

Six Questions interview #196 : Robin Blackburn McBride

Robin Blackburn McBride lives in Gatineau, Quebec. She is the author of a novel, The Shining Fragments, and a volume of poetry, In Green, both published by Guernica Editions. The Shining Fragments is an Editors’ Choice selection in Historical Novels Review. Robin is also the author of a self-help book, Birdlight: Freeing Your Authentic Creativity. Her short stories and poems have appeared in a variety of North American literary magazines, most recently in Voices de la Luna, Flights, The MacGuffin, El Portal, and flo. To learn more about Robin’s work, visit her website: www.robinblackburnmcbride.com.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa and what first brought you here?

A: I moved here in 2016, a year of emotional extremes. My aunt and uncle in Gatineau had become terminally ill. That spring, I made several trips from Toronto to visit them and to help Tante Monique find a care home for Uncle Derek.

The two had been a beautiful, funny, fiercely intelligent, and vital couple in my life since they first connected in 1980. Spending time with them in Ottawa and Gatineau had always bordered on magic.

In June of 2016, a few weeks after Monique died, I returned to their empty house thinking I was about to get it ready for sale. But sitting in the backyard on that first morning, I heard my aunt’s voice in my head. And it occurred to me—I didn’t need to sell the house. We could live here. Within minutes, I was on the phone to my husband and we’d made the decision to move.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing and subsequently the writing community here?

A: I was a bookish kid and began imagining being a writer in third grade. Later, I had an inspiring middle school teacher, John Armstrong, who typed everything I wrote between 1976 and 1979—a hundred pages of adolescent suspense stories and poems. Mr. Armstrong helped me believe I could write books.

After studying drama and English literature at university, and working as an actress for a few years, I went on to train as a teacher. While I scribbled in cafés and walk-in closets during my twenties, it wasn’t until my thirties that I got purposeful at writing again. Looking back, I think the delay had to do with being a young woman in an old system, becoming a mother and, in our culture, losing confidence in my early dreams. After my first marriage ended and I began the journey of a single parent in a tiny Toronto apartment, pouring energy into my raising my daughter, and also being prepared and present for my students, somehow I freed up space for writing. A homecoming.

My first book of poetry came out in 2002. Next, I wrote and revised my debut novel over a decade of teacher holidays, remarried, and released my twenty-year teaching job in order to focus on writing and life coaching. When I moved to Gatineau, initially my top priorities were to look after my uncle and his care, and to re-establish my coaching practice. Even though I’d just brought out a book on creativity and was waiting for Guernica to publish The Shining Fragments, it was as a coach and speaker that I initially got to know people here.

In November of 2022, after the pandemic had peaked, instead of returning to local gatherings as a life coach (though I still do that important work), I reached out to find connection among local writers. Attending the Ottawa Small Press Fair was an important first step.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

A: That remains to be seen, since I’m still new to this writing community.

On the topic of shifts (though a slight departure from your question), one I’d love to see, and perhaps be a part of, is the establishment of a creative writing centre or annual conference for writers in Ottawa. Or both. In a city that punches over its weight in the literary arts, the absence of those things here seems strange. And of course, if I’ve missed something (which is entirely possible), let me know. I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who’s already working on such a project, or who may be interested in sharing ideas. It would be great to learn more and to help.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide or allow?

A: Ottawa is a nation’s capital, yet in many ways it has the charms of a small town. I’ve felt at home getting to know other writers in the literary community here. I’ve also been moved by the depth, scope, and social relevance of the talks I’ve attended at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. To have nationally and internationally renowned authors dropping in for discussions over two extensive seasons each year, and to have those conversations feel so cozy and accessible—that makes Ottawa stand out.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you’ve approached your work?

A: Beginning to engage in this community has been inspiring, and inspiration goes a long way.

When I hosted a book table at the Ottawa Small Press Fair last November, I had the good fortune of meeting the organizers of the 241 Open Mic, a poetry series they were hosting on the last Thursday of each month. Those open mic events sparked me to read my poetry to live audiences again. It had been a long time. At the small press fair, I also met other Ottawa poets, writers, publishers, and editors, including members of the team at Arc Poetry Magazine, based here in Ottawa. Subscribing to Arc has been one great way of reading current Canadian poetry. And I discovered Bywords, a treasured online resource for writers and literature lovers in the Ottawa area, as well as the Riverbed Reads series which I’ve since enjoyed. At the same small press fair, another conversation led to my submitting work to the Ottawa-based literary magazine flo, and having short fiction and poetry published in Issues 3 and 4. In the picture on this page, I’m holding a copy of flo Issue 4, Reverie.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m writing new poems.

I’m also finishing revisions to my second novel, River of Dreams. Set in Toronto in 1914 and the early 1920s, it’s a hybrid of literary, historical, and metaphysical fiction. Picture a young Anna Paquin as the main character.

River of Dreams tells the story of Avery Conlon who, at age twelve, falls through a river of ice and drowns. The ones who drag her from the water, and up onto the frozen bank, declare her dead. But she’s not dead. She’s revived. And when Avery awakens, she can see things other people can’t see. She can hear things other people can’t hear. And she can feel things other people can’t feel. Years later, as a nurse at a mental hospital, Avery learns to use her gifts to save women shut away for their psychic injuries. It becomes her quest—one she’s forced to keep a secret. But will she be exposed? Dismissed as a freak? What happens when she falls in love? Can Avery stay true to her gifts and her calling?

 

Six Questions interview #195 : Julie McArthur

Julie McArthur writes and works as a freelance editor in Toronto. She has over twenty short stories published in literary journals across North America and the UK including The Antigonish Review, Joyland, Necessary Fiction, PANK, Prairie Fire, and the fable anthology The Lion and the Aardvark (Stone Skin Press). Her short story collection Men and the Drink received three grants from the Ontario Arts Council. juliemcarthur.com

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I was born and raised in Kanata, then a small suburb of Ottawa. Glen Cairn was a fantastic area to grow up in, with fields and farmlands abound.

At 16, my family moved to West Carleton (near Carp) and at 18, I moved to Toronto to study at the Ontario College of Art. After a year, I dropped out and moved back to Ottawa and lived in the Byward Market from 89-94 while working in restaurants and studying at college. I moved again to Toronto for a counselling and advocacy program, and lived there from 94-98, working as an early childhood educator while in school. I returned to Ottawa in 98 for a relationship that didn’t work out and then back to Toronto for a third time where I have since resided in the Parkdale neighbourhood.

I am back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto to this day, as my parents and brother still live there. I have now spent almost equal parts of my life in both cities, but I call Ottawa home.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I remember how thrilling it was as a child to learn how to print and read. I was a kid who was excited about parts-of-speech exercises and one who looked forward to spelling tests. My grade two teacher Mrs. Hobbs wrote on my report card, “In her stories Julie writes good sentences and expresses interesting ideas,” and I won second place for a Remembrance Day poem in grade three… so perhaps there was an inkling back then of things to come.

I think of myself as a late-blooming writer. I kept journals from a young age, wrote poetry and philosophies in sketch books as a teen, but visual arts was more a focus then. The idea of writing professionally or for an audience never crossed my mind. In my twenties, in Ottawa, I had a friend who owned a second-hand bookstore in Lowertown where I spent many a day and night, browsing books and hanging out with local musicians who jammed regularly in the back of the shop.

It wasn’t until I moved back to Toronto in 2000 that I began to think about writing stories. I had a friend from Ottawa who had published a couple of short stories, and another who had done poetry readings; they inspired me to think more seriously about writing and to sign up for a creative writing class. But after the teacher instructed students to write two pages of dialogue that would be presented in the second class, I immediately dropped out. I had social anxiety that could be debilitating.

Three years later I met Richard Scarsbrook, the right teacher at the right time, who became a mentor and friend; he encouraged me to submit a particular piece that I had workshopped in class to literary journals; it was my first publication. Ottawa author Matthew Firth published two of my early short stories in his journal Front&Centre, as well as my chapbook Men and the Drink through his micro press Black Bile Press. I am ever grateful to these and other early champions of my writing.

Publishing work, attending readings, and taking writing classes all helped connect me to writing communities in both Ottawa and Toronto.

In 2010, I founded F&G Writers, a writing workshop I ran out of my living room for the next eight years. I was inspired by the workshopping style of author Emily Schultz, who I had taken several classes with previously. F&G Writers was a small eclectic group; many writers were there from the group’s inception, with a few others dropping in and out over the years.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

My thinking about writing didn’t change, but workshopping regularly with other writers made me fall in love with the revision process and led me back to school to study grammar and editing, which in turn led me to work as a freelance editor. I edit all kinds of writing—nonfiction, novels, online content—but my first love is short fiction, and I have had the pleasure of doing so for the Canadian literary journal Agnes and True since 2016.

I’ve always found it easier to connect one on one with writers, rather than try to be a part of the broader community. I have many writer friends working in different genres and styles and hearing about their projects gets me excited, whether that be plays, short stories, songwriting, ekphrastic prose poems, documentaries, or comedy writing. Although I feel like a hermit these days, I do stay connected… one writer at a time.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

When I lived in Ottawa, I wasn’t aware of the literary community or what was happening outside the small group of artists I knew. This was in part to being an introvert and a loner of sorts. At that time, I never imagined writing stories that would be published or editing other writers’ work.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

So much of my writing has been and continues to be inspired by my early years in Ottawa. Half of my dreams still take place there, any of my stories are set in fictional recreations of Glen Cairn or Lowertown (home when living in Ottawa as an adult). A keen memory and journals are often used as references.

In Ottawa, before writing stories, I was a home support worker for older adults and an ECE supply teacher; both jobs had me travelling back and forth from one end of the city to the other. The way that neighbourhoods and communities influence one another fascinates me, and those observations definitely found their way into my work.

Q: What are you working on now?

As a passionate advocate for older adults, I have spent the last few years writing many, many letters of advocacy. I can’t say this type of writing brings the same joy as writing short stories, but I do love the investigative and journalistic aspects that focus on facts and even the practice of restraint necessary in this kind of writing.

I would like to get back to short stories, write personal essays, and publish nonfiction articles related to advocacy. I am also mulling over facilitating workshops from home once again, for local writers and those who consider themselves late bloomers.

Six Questions interview #194 : Don LePan

Don LePan’s best known book is Animals: A Novel (2009), described by J.M. Coetzee as “a powerful piece of writing, and a disturbing call to conscience,” and by the Globe and Mail as “psychologically incisive, admirably disquieting”; “few Canadian novels have been as powerful,” concluded the University of Toronto Quarterly. His third novel, Lucy and Bonbon, was published by Guernica in 2022.

Born in Washington, DC and raised in Ontario, LePan spent many years as a resident of Calgary, and has lived for briefer periods in New Orleans, Louisiana; Lewes, Sussex; and Murewa, Zimbabwe. Since 2009 his home has been Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Q: How long have you lived in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I have lived for two periods in Ottawa, for a total of nine years. The first was from 1955 to 1959, when I was a small child. My father worked for External Affairs (as the Department of Foreign Affairs was then known); he was posted in the early 1950s to Washington (where I was born), but returned to Ottawa in ’55. My earliest memories are Ottawa memories—steam trains along the canal, horse-drawn milk carts on Monkland Avenue, the vast pile of logs beside the E.B. Eddy plant in Hull; it was all a long time ago.

At one point when I was a lonely five-year-old I went door-to-door on Monkland, asking at each house if any five-year-olds lived there. That same year I remember running away from kindergarten when my parents went off to Bermuda for a week’s holiday; it seemed a reasonable thing to do at the time.    

I lived in Ottawa again when I went to Carleton between 1971 and 1975—and I have many fond memories from that period both of the Carleton English Department (Ian Cameron, Faith Guildenhuys, and Larry McDonald were three standouts among a group of first-rate professors), and of Ottawa generally. I’ve kept in touch over the years since; my mother lived in Ottawa until she died, and my brother lives there still. I was taken aback last winter to hear of the canal not being safe to skate on; my most memorable part-time job while I was a Carleton student was skate patrol on the canal.

In the early ’70s draft beer at the Grad’s Hotel or the Vendome was just 25 cents a glass. Those segregated bars (separate entrances and separate rooms for “Men” and for “Ladies and Escorts”) and those prices are long gone now, but I gather that Mike’s Place in the University Centre at Carleton is still going strong—hats off to them!  

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

At Carleton I took a Creative Writing-Poetry course that Christopher Levinson taught; it left me with a deep (though no doubt unfair) suspicion of Creative Writing courses generally. I did publish two poems during my undergraduate years (in the literary magazine Quarry), and I wrote my first novel—an embarrassing attempt at a political adventure novel. Somewhere I have a kind rejection letter from Jack McClelland that advised me to keep on trying.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? 

I never did really become involved with the Ottawa writing community, so this is one I can’t really answer. Indeed, I’ve never become involved in the writing community in any city I’ve lived in.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Sorry—I can’t answer this one either.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

For some reason I’ve never been tempted to set any of my work in the place I’m living in when I write. My first novel, Animals, is set in Alberta—but not in Calgary, the Alberta city I lived in at the time. My second novel, Rising Stories, is set entirely in Chicago—a city I love, but not one I have ever lived in. And my most recent novel, Lucy and Bonbon, is set in places where I lived long ago—Toronto and Calgary. I’m not aware of any city having changed the way I approach my work—with the possible exception of New Orleans, where I have lived twice, though each time only for a few months. New Orleans seeps into you and tells you that everything has changed, though I suspect it often lies. Ottawa, so far as I recall, keeps you at a discreet distance and makes you feel that things change very slowly.

At some point I may go back to a project I started a few years ago, which would be set at least in part in Ottawa; it explores the life that gay men lived in Ottawa in the 1950s; my father was one, the diplomat John Holmes (who I remember from my childhood as a warm and wonderful soul) was another. Rumor has it that Mike Pearson was another—though at this point that’s only rumor.

Q: What are you working on now?

A set of linked short stories entitled Leaving Pittsburgh. Quite a few of the characters in fact stay in Pittsburgh; others have decided to move—to New York, to Phoenix. The longest story (and by far the most difficult to write) focuses on the 2018 synagogue shooting.

Six Questions interview #193 : Lynn Coady

Lynn Coady (@Lynn_Coady) is the author of six acclaimed works of fiction, including the short story collection Hellgoing, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2013. Her most recent novel is Watching You without Me.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was there for 4 academic years for my undergrad degree, after which I spent a few years in New Brunswick for reasons I still don't quite understand.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I didn't really get involved in any kind of community but did take my first tentative steps as a writer, publishing poetry in the Carleton Arts Review (I think it was called) and taking a short fiction course with Gerald Lynch at U of O which I still remember fondly.
 
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
These were embryonic days for me as a writer! But what I realized at Carleton, after I flunked out of my first year journalism program, was that the kind of writing I wanted to do was not, in fact, journalism.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
It was a pretty formative period actually because it was my first time living somewhere besides Cape Breton island, so mostly I learned that the rest of the world wasn't Cape Breton and that there were a whole lot of other ways to look at and experience the world besides the ones I grew up steeped in. Being at a big uni like Carleton with students from all over was a slap upside the head in a good way.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
I think my novel Mean Boy, even though it's set in a uni town that's very different from Ottawa, captures the experience I'm describing above--that coming of age feeling that there's a big wide world out there that your life, up until this point, has not really prepared you for.

Q: What are you working on now?
TV projects mostly, although also maybe a book of short stories.

Six Questions interview #192 : Terry Fallis

A two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Terry Fallis is the author of eight novels, all of them national bestsellers—including five #1s bestsellers—and all published by McClelland & Stewart. The Best Laid Plans was the winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2008, and CBC’s Canada Reads in 2011. It was adapted as a six-part CBC-Television miniseries in 2014, and a stage musical in 2015. His third novel, Up and Down, was the winner of the 2013 Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award. His fourth novel, No Relation (2014) won the 2015 Leacock Medal. His eighth novel, Operation Angus (2021) was a CBC Best Books of 2021 selection. His ninth novel, A New Season, hits bookstores in August 2023. In 2013, The Canadian Booksellers Association named Terry Fallis the winner of the Libris Award as Author of the Year.

Terry has written for many publications including Maclean’s, Canadian Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Toronto Life, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star. He also teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. A skilled public speaker, he lives in Toronto. For more information visit www.terryfallis.com and subscribe to his newsletter at https://terryfallis.substack.com. 

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

A: Believe it or not, I only lived in Ottawa for about a year and a half. I arrived in the summer of 1984 to join the political staff of a Cabinet Minister in the newly-minted Liberal Government of Prime Minister John Turner, following his victory in the Leadership campaign. You may recall that Turner lost the election in September 1984 relegating the Liberals to the Opposition benches. My minister was re-elected and became Opposition critic for International Trade. I stayed with him for a year but moved back to Toronto in the fall of 1985 to work for the Finance Minister in the newly-elected Liberal Ontario Government of Premier David Peterson. 

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

A: It was in Ottawa in 1984 when I first tried my hand at a couple of short stories. It was purely recreational writing and I never submitted the stories to any journals. So I really didn’t get involved at all with the Ottawa writing community. In fact, I don’t remember knowing such a thing existed. It was not until years later (like 20 years later) that I wrote my first novel, The Best Laid Plans (2008), but it was set in Ottawa, as was the sequel, The High Road (2010), and finally my eighth novel, Operation Angus (2021) all featuring the same characters. The six-part CBC Television miniseries based on my first novel was shot in and around Ottawa, including inside the Parliament buildings. The city certainly provided a worthy backdrop for these three novels.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?

A: Regrettably, I was never really a part of the Ottawa writing community when I lived there, but I do know how important it can be to writers as we strive to connect with others in our field. I’ve since spoken to many different writers' groups on a range of topics, including presenting to a group in Ottawa, and I’m always struck by the feeling in the room. It just feels different when the room is filled with writers.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

A: As the nation’s capital and the seat of our government, Ottawa is of course central to three of my nine novels. Having worked on Parliament Hill and stalked the corridors and backrooms of Centre Block, my time in Ottawa was absolutely essential to my development as a writer. In short, events of national and sometimes international consequence unfold in this special city. I’ll never forget my time in Ottawa and always look forward to returning.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

A: As noted earlier, my first three novels would never—and could never—have been written were it not for my memorable time in Ottawa. Those novels could only ever have been set in Ottawa. And they led directly to a 6-part Television miniseries and a stage musical in Vancouver. So I owe the city a debt of gratitude for taking me in for a short time and giving such wonderful experiences, many of which are captured in the lives of my characters.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My ninth novel, A New Season, will arrive in bookstores on August 29th. It’s a bit of a departure from the more comic novels already behind me. And I will be appearing at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in late October talking about the new novel. I have already started working on my tenth novel.

 

Six Questions interview #191 : Rebecca Kempe

Rebecca Kempe is a writer, zinester, and multidisciplinary artist. Her work has been published in flo., The Ampersand Review, Sumac Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her plays, Each on Our Side and Signal Breakdown, were performed in the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Youth Infringement Festival, respectively. She is the author of There’s Nothing to See Here/Nothing Happens Here, a two-part zine which explores the stagnant (but at times welcome) stillness of the suburbs she grew up in through photography and prose. More of her work can be found at www.rkempe.ca and you can find her online as @arbeeko.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

My parents moved to Ottawa when I was a very young child, and I’ve lived here pretty much ever since, other than a brief stint in Waterloo for school.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

My parents encouraged my siblings and I to begin reading very early, and from there, writing must have been a natural transition. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but I can tell you that I remember already thinking of myself as a writer in first grade. I was totally that cliché elementary school writer kid who devoured novels and read craft books and carried a notebook around. Pretty much all of my English teachers were supportive, but my Grade 3 English teacher was the first to actually believe in me, which still means a lot to me. I wish I could contact her just to say thank you.

I submitted a lot to the OPL writing contests until I aged out, and met a few people that way, but other than that, I find that I’m actually a lot more connected to the local visual arts community, and to some extent the theatre community as well, than the actual writing scene. One of my high school teachers encouraged us to submit plays to the Youth Infringement Festival. My first play was selected to go through the dramaturgy process, and had two other plays make it all the way to production, and those experiences were instrumental not just to my development as a playwright, but to my development and confidence as a writer in general. I learned so, so much from the dramaturgs I worked with, who were awesome mentors throughout the revision process, and in 2021, I got to work with the director, state manager, and actors more directly, which was insanely cool.

I’ve been dipping my toes into getting more involved in the broader writing community in Ottawa, mainly through my university but also through submitting to local literary magazines like flo. flo. is one of my favourite lit mags right now, actually. The community around it is amazing and the editorial team does a wonderful job curating beautiful issues. Hopefully I’ll get around to attending more in-person events, but life is chaotic, so we’ll see.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I don’t know that being in a community of writers has necessarily shifted my thinking on the craft of writing, but it has definitely made me feel less alone and helped me feel a sense of legitimacy (which can be hard to feel in the arts sometimes). Being around and collaborating with other writers is invaluable. It’s helped me figure out who I want to be, and I also get to meet really cool people and support them. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to something bigger than myself. This is especially true when meeting other people in theatre, I think. Sure, you can write a play, but you need actors, directors, stage managers, set designers, etc. to bring it to life, and so it becomes a broader, collective vision, which is my favourite thing about writing plays.

But really, writers are always such cool people who do cool things, and it’s fun to hang out with cool people.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Ottawa gives you space to experiment, I think. To be multifaceted. To just let your work do what it wants without trying to become a brand. I’ve always said that this is a city with an ongoing identity crisis. Yes, this is a government city, but only in some ways. There is also a lot of high-tech, we have many museums and cultural institutions, and a ton of students move here from across the country. We’re close enough to Gatineau that a lot of people flip flop between the two cities. We have a sizeable community of francophones, which isn’t super common in Ontario. Ottawa is a city that manages to feel like a city while also feeling small. It’s a place that’s hard to define, and I think that perspective bleeds into the way people make art here. I don’t feel like I only have to be a writer or only have to be an artist and I meet artists who have day jobs in completely different fields all the time. And the community here feels very chill and supportive.

I think something that’s kind of unique about Ottawa is that so much of what happens here arts-wise is community based and community funded. It feels a little bit underground in some ways, and so while it can be a lot harder to find people and start going to events at first, the community feels a lot more intimate, I guess? Once you start meeting people you start getting to know everyone, and you find out about the other events, and you start going to those as well, and before you know it you feel like you’ve found your people.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I made two zines last year that responded directly to my time living in suburban Ottawa. The first is called There’s Nothing to See Here; the second is called Nothing Happens Here. They’re both in a hybrid essay/photo zine format and they explore my relationship with living in the middle of some random suburb where there isn’t much to do, how it felt, why I came to terms with it, and my updated thoughts on living in a suburb. I think the experience of living in a community that’s (possibly) a little bland and (definitely) very far from the rest of the city is very common in Ottawa, a city that while being the largest in terms of physical area has little to show in terms of population density or working transportation or existence of a downtown core. Living in suburbia can feel like living in a bit of a limbo, and I think based on what I’ve heard from people who move here from other cities, I can extrapolate to say that living in Ottawa in general can feel like that as well. But the point I wanted to make is that there is always something to enjoy if you’re willing to put in the effort to find it, and it’s especially true here.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have various bits and pieces of things that I’m making progress with on and off. I’ve started writing a collection of essays about various aspects of art, such as exploring what gives art value, what it means to have an artistic voice, and looking at what makes certain types of art more popular than others. It’s probably going to end up in some kind of zine along with some paintings and/or collages – the format is still a work-in-progress. You can find updates on my zines on Instagram at @arbeeko.

I’ve also been submitting poetry, which is very new for me. I’ve always written poems but thought of myself as primarily an essayist, so putting poems out there is a step outside my comfort zone.

Really though, I’m mostly trying to survive being a student. It’s a miracle that I still find time to write these days. Major props to anyone with a consistent writing schedule, I have no idea how you do it.

Six Questions interview #190 : David Currie

David Currie is a writer in Ottawa.  He is the author of five chapbooks and no book books. His chapbooks include Bird Facts (Apt 9 Press, 2014), Mystery Waffles (In/Words Press 2014), Poems for the Mishka (Shrieking Violet Press 2015), The Planets that Block our Light (In/Words 2015), and Memento Mishka (Apt. 9, 2023) in collaboration with Jennifer Baker. His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada most recently in Plants, Animals, and Humans (Apartment 613, 2023). He currently works as a political organizer – a job which brings him to exotic locations across Canada most recently the resplendent former municipality of Kanata.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? 

I was first brought to Ottawa by way of a cesarian section. I have lived here for most of the ensuing years with the exceptions of periods of failing to live in another city or attempts to escape the purgatory that our city occasionally feels like.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I’ve always written – from the time I could first speak I was playing with language. However, as with most things in my life shame prevented me from pursuing writing at Canterbury (I instead chose vocal music – an artform that is beautiful, if generally a little too self-serious).

I did however write my first and second plays in quick succession. They were well attended by my high school peers and not attended by my later friend Cameron Anstee who was unable to get a ticket due to the popularity of “Pants!”

A month later, I borrowed the complementary monogrammed Writer’s Festival pass of Agnies Grudniewicz and attended most of that year’s festival including a workshop (that I did pay for) by Trillium Award Winning Poet Stuart Ross. That workshop changed the way I thought about writing. The idea of exacting silliness began transforming my work.

In university, I continued writing plays and started stand up and, occasionally, poetry. By 2008, I was screenwriting for film and television.

I re-entered university that year as well and had the next transformative writing experience of my life: In/Words.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

In/Words is something that has been discussed at length on this blog, and I have a feeling as those who passed through it become more well-known, what Trilliam Award Winner Bardia Sinaee has dubbed “The In/Words Extended Universe” will garner even more data server usage (ink).

In/Words, at its best, fostered a community of writers constantly collaborating, editing, and encouraging new work by its writers.  In/Words was at once a magazine, a press, a writers’ circle, and a reading series. It was a constellation of writers all orbiting around a single grounding space.  That space was a broom closet with a printer, a computer in hospice, and a bearskin rug.

At its worst, In/Words was a community inspired by opposition in the tradition of First Statement, Contact, and the Cerberus collective.  As the In/Words writers have joined the diaspora of Canadian Literature I know many of us have struggled to purge this oppositional impulse from our writing.  I know I have.

My involvement with In/Words begat my participation in the small press fair, which begat Versefest.  The broader community of writers in Ottawa are warm, welcoming, and feature many incredibly talented people.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I don’t know if I can say that anything that happens here doesn’t happen anywhere else.  I will say that the incredible level of bureaucratic bumbling Ottawa has to offer creates a wonderful ironic backdrop to write in front of.  Whether it be the O-Train with its constant decommissioning due to predictable issues, the wrong Jack Purcell monument, the pin people, the haunted dog park at the edge of Lowertown, or the wonderful dead bird sculpture which likely got somebody fired – if you’re looking for it, you can find wonderful writing fodder.

However, Ottawa is also exceedingly beautiful with its nature spaces and river pathways. Gatineau Hills aside, this city has the arboretum and the experimental farm, the greenbelt, and three downtown waterways, not to mention the myriad of botanical gardens.  There are so many opportunities to surround yourself in natural beauty that it’s easy to forget how absolutely ridiculous having 4 levels of government who do not communicate with each other and fail to accomplish anything successfully is.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I’m always trying to write about Ottawa or In/Words or lampoon my time working on Parliament Hill.  However, usually I run out of steam before figuring out what I’m writing.

Right now, I am trying to write a tryptic exploring my traumatic bipolar disorder diagnosis, the community that I loved a decade ago and my efforts to reach out to it now, and then finally the current apocalypse we are currently living through and being inconvenienced by.  The end question of the whole project is "who would you want to spend the end of the world with?"  For me, it’s the people of In/Words.

It’s a tall order and could be impossible.

Q: What are you working on now?

Apart from the above project stuck on a raft, for the past four years my main focus has been finishing a novel.  I always need two projects to flip between to avoid losing writing momentum but “Gary Hughes” is the big one.

Gary Hughes is a novel about groundhogs, specifically one groundhog named Gary Hughes.  In the book, all groundhogs have a biological ability to time travel but humans have never noticed because they don’t do anything we would recognize as interesting.  The novel explores their time travel exploits and the ripples across time they create and how those ripples are resolved.  The Groundhogs are anthropomorphized as little as possible.  I’m hoping to be finished by the end of 2023 and publish it sometime before the world ends.

 

Six Questions interview #189 : Madeleine Stratford

Madeleine Stratford is a poet, a literary translator and an associate professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her first poetry book, Des mots dans la neige (éditions anagrammes, 2009) was awarded the 2009 Orpheus Poetry Prize in France. Her French translation of Ce qu’il faut dire a des fissures by Uruguayan poet Tatiana Oroño (Paris, L’Oreille du Loup, 2012) was awarded the 2013 John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation by the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, and also received a commendation from the jury of the 2012 Nelly Sachs Translation Prize in France. Three of her translations were shortlisted for the Governor General award (2016, 2019, and 2021), and one for the Young Readers Kirkus Prize (2017). Her recent work includes Swallowed by Réjean Ducharme (Véhicule Press, 2020) and Chasseurs de rêves by Cherie Dimaline (Boréal, 2023).

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I am originally from the Eastern Townships, but I have travelled quite a lot. After living in Germany, Spain, Montreal, and Quebec City, I first moved to Gatineau for work in September 2009. I had my eye set on Ottawa from the start, though, and eventually bought my first house here in 2018. I have been a happy Vanier dweller ever since!

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I have been writing since as long as I can remember, but I guess I started getting truly involved while in CEGEP, when I became editor of our student literary journal Chimère. I then went on to write quite a lot of poetry while I was doing my BA and my MA, and some of my poems got published in book form in France in 2009.

When I first started to write poetry, I felt I could be creatively deviant and subversive: I could write everything in lower-case, decide to leave out punctuation marks and put words all over the page – or not. I first wrote in French, obviously, but also wrote a little in German, and quite a lot in Spanish at some point. A few of the poems included in my first poetry book, Des mots dans la neige (anagrammes, 2009) were actually first written in Spanish (while I lived in Spain), and then translated (or rather rewritten) into French.

Curiously, English was not a language in which I felt comfortable writing poems. For me, it had always been an academic language, in which I wrote article, essays, but not poetry. It just did not feel right. Then, one day, a publisher in Syracuse I was working with asked me to translate a selection of my own poems into English. English suddenly became a poetic language for me. I wrote a few texts in English over the past few years, some of which can be found online.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Until now, I have published mainly translations, but have also taken part in quite a few public readings here, including at VerseFest. My peers have consistently motivated me to go on writing. It is thanks to them that I have not given it up poetry!

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I find people here are particularly receptive to bilingual or multilingual poetry. I enjoy how different languages and cultures are welcome to interact and grow together, particularly in Ottawa.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

Living in Ottawa has made me want to write more poetry in French, my first language. It is important to me that French continues to thrive, here in Ontario. I am in touch with quite a few Francophone poets here. I want to be part of that community and strengthen its different networks, both through my translations and my own writing.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am currently working on a book project funded by the Ontario Arts Council. Now that I have spent over a decade learning to write “like” other people as a literary translator, I feel it is time to rediscover my own voice and find out how it has evolved. I am going back to my roots, writing in French. It is both exhilarating and daunting to write “as myself.” The book is slowly coming together. I am curious to see what comes out of it!